I've had a few similar moments in my career (though they're mercifully few these days). I've never had the luxury of doing anything but pursuing the requests with vigor (and sleep-deprivation), though. As one of the two main developers of our company's product, I once had to fly down to the office (I telecommuted from another state at the time) and spend several days only taking 1-2 hours off each day to sleep, eat, or shower. We were handed a sudden deadline to demo the product to the new CEO, and almost none of the features he'd been promised were ready when we started. We got most of it done, albeit poorly in many cases, and coped by bringing beer to the demo. When they woke me up after the demo, they said the CEO had been pleased. ;)

My problem with such requests has always been that the requestor never seems to get it through his/her pointy head that there is often a very big difference between doing something impossibly fast, and doing it right. This is doubly infuriating when the time crunch is caused by a marketron telling a potential client that a feature the developers have never heard of is a standard part of the software.

Fortunately for all involved, my relatively strong work ethic has always made me chunk out the solutions in the nick of time. And despite my low frustration tolerance, I've managed to avoid doing or saying anything drastic thus far.

In the end, I usually took a little time at the beginning to get a handle on the best approach to the problem, then cried havoc! and let slip the dogs of war. And by giving up some of my free or sleep time, I usually managed to get a decent solution written, or one that had the hooks in it to be converted to something more broadly useful.

- rattus, random hairballs from the nest

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Re: Development at the speed of thought.
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We had similar experiences at my last job. We used to have a salesman who did like to sell stuff we didnt have, requiring us the developers to produces it out of thin air. One particular case was the legendary "Currency Converter" The final instant product was a bit of perl and javascript that pinched the currency rates from a less than official exchange rate page that we found. The converter still exists over 4 years later. It used to update the rates automaticaly, but the source site changed their format and it broke. Now it just gets updated when someone remembers.
And what happened to the saleman in question? Well he finished up as sales director of course. :-}

I used to work at the same place too but didn't get hit by that one as much. It seemed my job description detailed my responsibility to deliver prototypes as core business functions. You know the one. . . . here Simon, see if this works. . . . . thats nice, add a login to it cos I've promised a big client it will work by tomorrow afternoon.

Always a laugh. Almost as much as the old - give the team work without telling me and then drop me in it with the M.D cos I'm not keeping your promises - trick :)

Oh and of course, theres the one where a different manager walztes into your office and demands to know why your prototype (a.k.a business solution) is so cr*p and proceeds to attempt to berate you in front of your co-workers. Naturally you are receptive to this, even though he managed to wipe your new design off a meeting room whiteboard that you and the design team worked till 2am on and its STILL NOT his fault :)